2145 - How Neuromarketing Can Transform Business Connections with Halcon Marketing's Nicole Powell

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1:05With us right now, it is Nicole Powell. Nicole, you are the CEO of Halcon Marketing Solutions. Your website is halconmarketing.com. Nicole, it's great to have you. I'm so happy to be here, Josh. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Well, tell me what you're listening to or watching lately. What's new in the entertainment world for you that you've been into? Okay, so very much obsessed with Chapel Roan right now. Oh, yeah. album over and over and over again. Yeah. As far as what I'm watching, it's pretty much whatever my three-year-old and five-year-old is watching. You're at that stage. Correct. We just watched Dog Man.

1:50Oh, the movie, the new movie? The movie. It was good. It was interesting. But I'm one of those people that watches cartoons and questions things that don't make sense, even though I'm already watching something that in its entirety can't be possible. right? So I'm like, how did he become a dog? How, you know, so, but overall it ended up really great. And, um, as a parent, you have to do something to entertain yourself, right? Everything is relative. Yeah. Or I love RuPaul's Drag Race. So I've been watching. Oh yeah. Great, great, great energy. You know, they had one show. It was, I think it was last year they had a did you see the hell the holly or the halloween special is on hulu it was like the huloween special it was it's so campy so fun but um it's it's worth you if you if you're on hulu uh why it's just it's a lot of fun so oh i will definitely check it out i even have wow wow yeah well okay international drag race yeah yeah well tell me about halcon marketing what you do?

2:56Sure. So How Come Marketing is an agency that I started about six years ago. So what we're really known for is brand strategy and neuromarketing. So what I like to do is I call it the fusion of all of these different ways to gather insights about our audience. So whether that's market research, tapping into the psychology of things, we have a neuroscientist on our team who helps us with more of the neuromarketing brain stuff. Obviously, we have our own innate creativity, but we really, really hone in on what makes your business a brand, right? Like how do you stand out? But the first step in that is really understanding how your audience behaves, how they make decisions.

3:42And I think a lot of the marketing out there right now kind of skips this phase, right? how critical it is to create that brand and to speak to your audience. It's kind of, I think, pumping out a lot of content, but not necessarily relating it to the real nitty gritty needs from a psychological and philosophical standpoint. So that's kind of what we love to do is to create marketing that really connects with people and tapping into all those different platforms and channels in order to accomplish that. Yeah. Is neuromarketing just fancy words? I mean, because marketing is marketing, or do you want to maybe explain that a little bit?

4:22Absolutely. So neuromarketing is really kind of this fusion of marketing, obviously, psychology and neuroscience. So there's a lot of research, a lot of studies out there where you're essentially provided stimuli, marketing stimuli, and they do brain scans to see which part of your brain gets activated or triggered when you're presented a specific type of stimuli. So what really made me gravitate towards this and like looking at research and how do we take these insights and translate it into our marketing message is that a lot of our decisions are made on a subconscious level, obviously, right?

5:04So the idea - Emotional reasons for buying now. Correct, right. So what I was always, what I always yearn for myself was to have some sort of scientific link, right? So something that I could read research and know these scientists, these researchers did X, Y, Z, and it yielded this because the brain actually got activated and this is why they made that decision. And when they presented this, it didn't actually yield to the conversion or the action that we theoretically wanted. So it's really honing in on the research from these brain scans, right? And using that knowledge and infusing it into essentially what you're doing.

5:50So I'm obviously a marketer, but I think in a different life, I probably would have been a neuroscientist. So that's why I collaborate a lot with the neuroscientists on our team, right? She's a professor because she obviously understands the brain in a different level than I do. And she has also access to a lot of different research and I write for a neuromarketing blog. So I get access to reach us. So I'm always kind of pulling all of this scientific data from all these research articles and seeing how it could apply and how we can experiment with it on our campaigns. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I think books like maybe like Dan Ariely, you know, Predictably Irrational, things like that.

6:32Okay, well, just, Nicole, what do brains like? What? I'm sorry? What do brains like? Oh, what do brains like? Well, they like to feel safe. They like, and again, that's going into your brain, right? Like what, from a biological standpoint, like what will make me feel safe? So ultimately, when our ancestors were growing up, like what will make me feel like I'm not going to get eaten? Well, in this day and age, you know, what will make me feel what what experiences will lead to less amount of risk? Right. Are you reliable service? Do I know what to get from your product or your service? There's no surprises that makes me feel safe and secure.

7:19Right. So our brains love that. But they also love emotion, kind of like what you said earlier. That's the thing that's going to drive the memory. So I actually led a workshop this morning with a bunch of small business owners, and I told them that great marketing is essentially like winning the competition for people's memories, right? Especially in this day and age, you're bombarded, I'm sure everyone in your audience knows, with a bunch of different marketing messages at the same time. So if you're keeping it very surface level and just talking about the actual service or product itself, the different options you have, all of these things, and not necessarily weaving in the stories and the narrative that lead to that deeper connection and relationship, and also brain consistency, right?

8:07And saying these narratives and these core messaging consistently throughout all of your touch points, then you're going to lose that game. You want to win and tap into that part of the brain that feels. So what would be maybe something that, you know, someone just listened to our conversation right now, maybe a simple thing that they could do, maybe looking at their own website, looking at their own communication, that might cause them to step outside themselves and put themselves in that, you know, maybe that, you know, the emotionally vulnerable or the emotionally open parts of the brain of their ideal customer?

8:46How can we better put ourselves in that position so that we can look at things a little bit more clearly? Sure. I actually do this exercise a lot for, with my clients, and even when I kind of create brand books, you know, looking at what the surface level problem is and which is what I think a lot of individuals do, right? So what is the immediate problem? And then ultimately folks just market to that, right? A lot of the times, but it's really getting down to the nitty gritty and looking at your marketing assets and seeing if you're really talking to your audience in a deeper level, what are their actual fears?

9:24So for example, if I am a realtor catering to a specific demographic, for instance, physicians or something like that. Yes, they need a new house because they need to relocate quickly. But what is their deeper fears? What is their deeper concerns or challenges, right? Is it because I need to relocate quickly, but I'm concerned how this move will affect my family. And for the spouse, Like, okay, like I have to move my entire family. My husband or wife is busy. I need to make sure that everything's in place. Will I be able to do it, right? So if you're just marketing for the superficial, then chances are you're just gonna talk about your great services and how this house sold.

10:14And that house, right? So which is, there's value in that, but at the same time, really not talking to people where they're at. You're not meeting them where they're at when you're forming that connection. So I think stepping back and looking at your assets in that way is really critical. So it's almost like there's features and then there's benefits. But I think there's another layer beyond that when we start to think about, well, wait a minute, why would our ideal customer be concerned about this? You know, if they're saying this is a pain point, what does that represent to them? What is the fear that surrounds that problem?

10:50Like what might their, think about like if they were prone to anxiety, like where might they take this thing that's uncomfortable, like, and they can go to a consultant and say, this is the thing that we are having a problem with in our business. It's like, yeah, but why do you care? Like, what's the problem? It's almost like just digging into what's emotionally behind that. And I think that that really does uncover some pretty valuable insights that would probably make for better language of communication. Yeah. And ultimately, we all just want to feel like we're connected and it's a mutually beneficial relationship, right?

11:31You take care of me, I'll take care of you. But I'm not going to get that with just marketing that talks about what you offer, right? And what you sell. Yeah, but it's great. It's kind of like a challenge. It's like a mystery, right? When you talk to audiences and customers and clients and you just keep asking them those questions. And you can tell when folks are reluctant to really tell you what they're thinking and saying. But that is what is the secret sauce. Like, well, that's where the marketing is going to shine is when you get to the nitty gritty of the things that they probably tell their loved one right before bed.

12:10those fears, covering that, and then showing how your business meets them there and will help them in some capacity curb or ease those anxieties. That's where the secret sauce is. You know, and I'm just thinking about, so, you know, we work with a lot of consultants and, you know, I work as a kind of a chief revenue officer and, you know, we have conversations about what their sales conversations are. And I think you're talking about something that I think is just so important. You know, when we feel safe around somebody and like we've established a relationship and we have a friendship together, you're much more likely, like if your goal is still to grow your business, you want to help people, you know, getting to that point of higher trust and getting, you know, more disclosure where someone's willing to just kind of lay the cards on the table, then you start to get the real story.

13:04And, you know, so I think there's a lot of lessons here for people that are involved in, you know, they're on sales conversations. They could use this same thing, leading in empathy, so that we can truly solve the real fear, the real concern that they may have. I like this. This is a really productive conversation. Yeah. And if I could just add to that, Josh, is in addition to that empathy and to the relationship, I think there has to be personalization in sales and marketing at all times. I think there's this reliance on using a lot of the great tools that are out now, whether it's AI or any sort of thing like that, to just like send out messages, but not bring that sense of personalization, which will lead to the empathy part, right?

13:49If I feel like this is a mutually beneficial relationship, the first thing that's going to enable me to feel that is if you actually took the time to reach out to me in a very personalized way. And in the same vein of the great tools we have, there are so many ways that we can tap into our tools to segment, to personalize, to create marketing messages that address specific segments of our audience so that whatever it is that we're talking about, whether you're selling them something or selling a product, whatever it is, you're able to, again, meet them where they're at and talk to them in a way that they can understand and they can relate to versus just doing the quick thing.

14:42How can we, in our language, thinking about the clients that you work with, how do we convey that, if it's confidence, if it's letting our audience know, I got you. Like if you're worried about this, I need to let you know that that's exactly what I fixed that problem. And I've done this hundreds of times. I can solve this. Like language like that. But how can we do that better maybe in our social media or what's on our website? Right. So I really think it lies in one first diversifying your content, where it leads. The end result is that feeling and that emotion that you're talking about. And let me give you an example.

15:28So I want to understand and relate to you on a human to human level. And the best way to do that, right, is through storytelling. Right. You've heard it. It's not nothing new. What I'm saying right now is nothing new. You've seen it, heard it. But I think where people fall short is they either just talk about me, me, me, me, me, me, this is my story. This is my, and then there's no social proof or no, no one else to vouch for it. Right. So again, what we're trying to do is make our audience, our customers feel safe. We want them to not fear the decision they're about to make, right. Whether it's buying the next shoe or buying a house, whatever it is.

16:08So I think if we show our story and make people like us, right. And show that, Hey, I've been through it, show some vulnerability there as well as our results, which is great. But sometimes people might not trust that. Hey, of course, you're going to say great things about yourself because that's your business. That's your job. You're doing better. Man, if you're not saying good things about yourself, we're definitely running for the hills. So I think we want to build that trust by showing our credibility, but at the same time, let other people speak for us. And it doesn't have to be a client or a customer all the time.

16:45It could be colleagues we work with that can speak to our approach, who we are as individuals. And I think that mix of content without saying, buy, buy, buy, sell, sell, sell, I think that's really going to help your customer at the end of the day say, I'm making the right choice. I can look at them and say, this is the reliable option, the lowest risk, and I know I'm going to get what I'm promised and what I want at the end of the day. Yeah. Nicole, I wish we had more time. On my personal Facebook, I shared this image. I've been using, we just redid our garage, our garage flooring. So I bought a ton of Rust-Oleum products.

17:26And I was so shocked when I opened up a box and on the box, and this is going to blow your mind. It says, this is what Rust-Oleum's mission statement is. It says, our mission to create and keep customers. That's it. So it's a sell stuff and keep people buying, basically. like anyway listen higher nicole please please you're not doing yourself any favors you got a good product you just goodness gracious don't make this so hard for us to like your product um yes and yeah nicole um your website is halconmarketing.com h-a-l-c-o-n marketing.com um so you have resources i'm dead you know there might be someone that's just kind of curious to learn a little bit more about you, or maybe there might be someone who's, they're searching for you.

18:21They found this podcast episode. Now they've listened to our conversation and now they want to connect with you. What are the paths forward? So obviously the website, as you mentioned, but we're really active. My agency and myself are really active on social media at Halcon Marketing. and I'm also a fractional CMO on this, in addition to an agency owner and my personal Instagram is at Nicole Powell Brand. First, last name, Brand. And I'm always chatting on there. So feel free to follow and I share some tips as well. Yeah, you do. You're a great follow on LinkedIn and Instagram too. So, and I like that you just, you post a lot of, you've got a great, I'd recommend to our friend that's listening, just go look at what's shared on your Instagram.

19:14I think you're doing Instagram well as a company. So I just want to compliment you on that. All right. Helicon Marketing Solutions, a website, heliconmarketing.com. Nicole Powell, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Josh.

19:36Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

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